A Quick Death in Texas: The Setting, Part 1

Hey, welcome back. Now, we're properly set to explore the place A Quick Death in Texas is going to take place in, first from an orbital view, then from a quick drive through the place itself. The goal of this writing? Create a feel for a tangible place that has both weight and nature, rather than being a backdrop for space adventures to start exploding on. I didn't want to make another ass-end-of-the-galaxy planet that more edgy science fiction likes to trope up for funsies, because one, why would you ever want to try to settle a shitty planet, and two, wouldn't it actually just be easier to not settle it, and instead build a satellite station around it? No, first, I wanted to make it seem logical that people would even want to touch down in the first place, give it wonders worth exploring and beauty that's worth seeing first hand. Then, I wanted to make it seem like a place that's the right type of place to stay, for the right sort of people.

The next half of this? I'll be about the culture of New Laredo, and some of the important folks who live there, that are neither 99er or scumbag. For now, here's a ride through planetside and township. Enjoy!

The Planet Ometochtli

Ometochtli is a planet that’s just somewhat on the dry side of being fertile, one with a crust rich to warrant interest from just about anyone looking to set down and set up a civilization, provided they don’t mind sharing the wilderness with xenoflora and xenofauna that could be considered roughly equivalent of the, uh, Mesozoic Era.

There’s dinosaurs here. The locals don’t call much attention to it. Unless the raptors start jumping the terraforming fences, again, then it’s either stay inside, or get a gun.

The name is pronounced, roughly, Oh-Me-Tok-Tlee. The name refers to a literal Aztec party animal god, or at least an incarnation of a god (or gods; Imperialism did us no favors in preserving Aztec culture) brought on by becoming fully turnt on the absolutely brutal liquor, pulque. It quite literally means Two Rabbit, which folks decided was fitting, considering the makeup of it’s first settlers, with Latinix Terrans making up the majority of a third as many Northern Diaspora Arissiyans- a nod to an old god of the Aztec, as well as folks who have long ears. Because Arissiyans have a tendency to file the edges off of consonants- you try enjoying the sound of mouth clicks when you have ears that sensitive -it’s put their pronunciation of the name close to Oh-Me-Oh-Lee, which means they’ve given it their own name: Omiophli, literally Big Puck. Excuse you? Yeah, from orbit? It looks like the hand-puck (the ophli) you’d slide on a waxed table, when you were playing Larone, an Arissiyan bar game that’s what’d you get if you combined billiards, curling and table hockey, then bolted a shot clock to the table.

The planet wasn’t just flash-splashed down on, like so many failed worldsettling attempts. Ometochtli is the result of a lot of hard work and a very long search, for a planet that wasn’t just good enough, but ticked all the boxes one hundred percent. This wasn’t just about obvious things, like “does this world have a breathable atmosphere?” and the further questions a yes to that asks, like “okay, does it contain airborne matter that will poison us, suffocate us or alter our genome in the short or long term?” or “yes, but will the atmosphere either freeze our lungs or burn them out when we breathe it?” It wasn’t just rational material things either, like whether or not the soil could be turned into something workable and farmable, if there was anything native that could be used for construction and, like, if it had water at all. That last one’s a bit of a dealbreaker, honestly. No, it’s perfect- it’s dry, yes, but just within acceptable measures for hominid sapient life as we understand it. The gravity is a cozy .917 G, which is just slightly light for Terrans, right in the zone for Arissiyans, and close enough for jazz for basically anything carbon-based with a pulse. Multiple evolutionary xenobiologists and archeologists have also signed off on the implications of settling the world- this planet? It missed the window for sapients for develop, for this aeon. Pretty sure, at least. For the next few million years, at give or take? It’s just dinos and protobirds and megamammals and some extremely army-ass insects, and us. Also, leviathans in the saltwater seas. STAY OFF THE SEAS. They aren’t safe.

Originally greenlighted for first settlement in 1996, Ometochtli has since become known as the Third Gem of the Freelands, representing its status as being the third established planet with multiple independent-yet-cooperative settlements, behind Samoud, The Second Terra, and Evergreen, The Forest of the Stars. It has earned the epithet The Sun’s Prosperity. It speaks of two things: one, the reason why people come all the way out here, to the farthest corner of the Freelands that people consider ‘Formalized Freeland Space’ and not ‘Freeland Frontier, Space Dragons or Nazis a Distinct Possibility’, and that it’s a place where folks can come to find any sort of work they want, from the hard, muscle-aching honesty of sodbusting and orchard work, to the limelight of the performing arts. Two, it’s hot as fuck there, and even though it has water? It’s got the low end of acceptable amounts of water. This means the dry parts that draw their water from deep desert aquifers can go from scorching in the day to near-freezing in the night, and the coastline regions generally feel like a pressure cooker on a low-medium setting throughout the days and nights.

Ometochtli has a very slight axial tilt with its north pole away from Quetzecoatl, its sun, meaning it has little seasonality, its southern hemisphere being drenched in a brutal, unending, bleaching summer, and the northern “winter” hemisphere containing the planet’s most easily settled and desirable zones- in other words, nobody much tries to go below the equator on this planet, at least not in the long term. It is deeply unpleasant there, and it’s sorta hard to store water that just wants to keep evaporating. That doesn’t mean the Low Badlands are entirely uninhabited by life; to the contrary, it is filled with an abundance of life you should never approach under any circumstances without protective equipment, because to it, you are the water source.

Yeah, general Ometochtli safety rule: stay away from either extreme of wet or dry environment, both contains things that will attempt to eat you. Or drink you.

The Equator and the Low Badlands beneath are places collectively referred to as The Scorch, both because of the inhospitable heat and the fact that most people that say they’ve got work for you out there? It’s a scorch, don’t go for it.

Just north of that is what’s known as the Lichen Belt, which is another one of those pretty self-explanatory names, at least in one aspect. A lot of lichen grows there, off the rocks, in massive colonies that spread across the landscapes and bloom into things akin to forests made of naturally occurring origami and finely packed dust. For most settlers and visitors, the Lichen Belt is a land of “holy shit, what the fuck is this?” Except for botanists, who tend to scream that way louder, repeatedly, sounding like they’re losing their mind at what they’re seeing, because they probably are. Folks, we barely can explain lichen as it is, let alone lichen as it is in The Belt. There aren’t much in the way to be found of formalized settlements here, but science teams from all across the Freelands flock to this place like it’s goddamned Woodstock. With good reason, even laypeople can expand their horizon of understanding just by spending a few moments going “uh, no, seriously, what the fuck is this? Holy shit that’s cool” at the local lichenscape.

North of that, you get reaches that start to look more like savannah than anything else, except where the grass starts to get too high to really be seen as savannah, and starts being a thing more like a forest. It’s not quite what folks would call verdant in the traditional green sense, but it’s a place that’s at least golden-white with plant and animal life. Where it’s not flat, it rolls and the collapse and slide of rock formations that dot these hills form these neatly flat natural stone walls, that look in some places like someone’s attempt at making a castle. Here, the soil starts to get notably nitrate rich and the environment gets sufficient precipitation, that you start to see the first terraforming fencelines along the roadways. These aren’t just to keep alien wildlife in and native wildlife out, but it’s to show an enforced agricultural safety line: on this side, you can plant stuff and it’ll be fine, but on the other side? Can’t assume it won’t cause your programmable citron trees to grow arms that will attempt to box you, should you try to pick the citrons. Also, the citrons themselves? They contain alien parasites, and they are really fascinated by your liver. In this region, New Dallas is the major settlement, a place big enough to have a planetside dockyard fed by a space elevator. Which means the New Big D? Pretty Big. That’s a pretty Big D.

Above that is where you start to get the greener bits of Ometochtli, the wetland reaches, the lakelands, the chameleon-shade red-gold-green-purple canopies of the jungles, the first mountains and cliffs of the high country, and the beautiful green coastlines. The green coastlines that contain things that are like sharks, if sharks felt actual hatred instead of curious hunger, were the size of orcas, and were enraged by surfers. That does not stop people from surfing them, by god, it just means there’s a lot of signs people have to walk by to get to the water, just that they make sure they understand what’s about to happen.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the mid-high latitudes on this planet? Really pretty.

It’s in fact the coastal cliffs of this region that brought home the first settlers of this world, those aboard the Nuevo Unidad, a colony ship that suffered a freak mishap with a gravitic stabilizer upon entering atmosphere. Imagine losing a tail rotor, except instead of giving a helo counter-torque to avoid spinning uncontrollably, it prevents the laws of physics from properly taking hold of an object as utterly titanic as a colony ship up until the time it can sufficiently decelerate that it can safely set down, without gravity deciding “yeah that’s a huge no, superchief, nothing that heavy should be flying, that’s snapping in half right now.” Held together by a crew that was flying mostly on feeling and nerve, they aimed their now significantly harder-to-steer-now-that-it’s-realistically-heavy horizontal skyscraper at the most welcoming landing zone they could find as they came in over the sea- two high coastal cliffs, with a broad and long inland bed of fine sand that stretched between the them -and somehow surfed it in without a single soul aboard being lost. This miracle gave the cliffs their names, the Two Saints, and the settlement and eventual metropolis that it grew into its name: Dos Santos. A city where the streets are paved with semiprecious stones, because the local hills are so rich with them, that’s pretty much what folks use them for, it’s known paradoxically as a place of high entertainment and endless partying, but also of great faith. In this place, professional wrestling has found its capital, and the downtown never truly ever shuts down, because it has no reason to; also in this place, the Pope of the Holy Unified Catholic Church sits in exile in a cathedral sat beneath the reclaimed Christ the Redeemer.

Up beyond that, toward the relative cool zone of the north pole, you enter what the locals have dubbed Pillar Country, due to the shape of the… mountains? They’re really more just big pillars, emerging out from blue-green needle-trees, that can rise for literal kilometers just straight out of the ground, with the tectonic foundations of these formations buried deep in the planet’s crust. Like the Lichen Belt, this is the home much of the planet’s strange wonder, and it attracts many looking to expand their knowledge the lay of the Freelands. It’s also remarkably difficult country to settle, but that doesn’t mean folks haven’t tried, and in one particularly notable case, succeeded beyond belief: this is the case of Hightower Arcology, the central city that supplies two dozen significantly smaller settlements in the region, which is quite literally one particularly sturdy and deep buried pillar being rebuilt into a natural arcology. The interior has been hollowed out and reinforced, into which space to live, work and grow has been built, while the exterior has become a glass-encased vertical farm, arboretum and solar collector. While obviously not taken as something you can just set up anywhere, and also a place that operates within certain population tolerances- it’s hard to get an apartment in an arcology for a few reasons -it has nonetheless become pretty famous simply for being what it is.

The day cycle on-planet is a long-but-manageable 28 hours, with people actually preferring to rise in the late morning, so they can approach the workday in the afternoon so as to not work to exhaustion during hours where it’s only just heating up. It also gives people more family and leisure time in the highly desirable twilight hours, where the sky turns the sort of purple-pink you typically only see on a good synthwave album cover, or in a bad cocktail. At that time, when competing troupes of bioluminescent flying insects emerge from their hives to lightshow-battle each other for territory, and from the jungles, massive bird-bat-lizard in-betweens swoop out into the evening for one last snack before the energy-conserving nighttime hours, and out from the coast, flying solar jellyfish emerge to absorb the only gentle light their soft bodies can handle above water, in preparation of the dark where they hang like lanterns- this place, this planet? It becomes a magic place to be, the kind of place where it makes you feel both courageous and privileged to call home.

New Laredo

Go long enough down Highway 1 South, and the eco-pave will eventually peter out, becoming really more of just a hard-packed country road that turns into a dust storm every time something heavy with wheels travels down it at speed. It doesn’t mean the road becomes any less distinct, because on each side, it’s lined with terraforming fences, marking the presence of extensive pipeline irrigation. Despite the soil being dry, it’s got enough living in it that the presence of a little extra water and a few other choice ingredients can make it downright hospitable for terraforming agriculture, so long you keep your expectations of what you can grow in the heat within reasons. There’s fields of golden maize here that grow eartip-high to an arissiyan- the adaptive seeds took to the challenge of the sun and heat better than anyone could have dreamed. Even more surprising is the green grass… and the Texas Longhorns grazing it. A little bit bigger and burlier in some parts than their Terran counterparts, and a bit longer and narrower elsewhere, but Texas Longhorns all the same- the cattle ranch lives as capitalism never gave it a chance, with common fields shared and maintained as a public resource between unions of freegrazers, who follow their herds in caravans and live like solar-powered nomads.

You might think to yourself, damn, that’s not something I was expecting. That’s wholesome in a way that hits between hippy and heartland.

Then you spot the fields of blue agave, peyote and cannabis, and you realize that yeah, even wholesome people like to party too. It doesn’t hurt that all of those things really like sun, and aren’t going to complain about the weather.

Soon the roadside starts to get lined with rows of greenhouses, and the communal homes of the folks who work them. This is where traffic starts to pick up again, and the pave starts to properly resume. You start to see a lot more hauler drones and a lot more trucks, and if you look to the horizon, you see why: there’s New Laredo. You realize that’s why you didn’t see it until just now: it’s not small, but it’s not really big either, not particularly tall that it has highrises that are going to make it stick out from the natural landscape. Really, it’s sorta like what Reno looked like up until recently: yes, it had that big, cool main drag, but what they don’t show you? Is that there’s not much else there, in terms of big city. What few big buildings that make up the downtown core, like the modest-yet-dignified Community Council tower, the jet age-futurist Central Post office building, and the technicolour glory of the Neon Gallery entertainment complex, huddle around main street in such a way that makes it seem that, when you’re on the sidewalk looking up, you feel as though you could be in a New Dallas, or a Dos Santos (or a Port of St. Joseph or an Insomnia, if we want to use a place Canine has already been, whatever).

Then, you walk a block either north or south, and then, you’re back in a settlement town. Sure, it’s a town, not a village nor the even more common thing, the famous ‘smattering of unarranged and unmarked prefab habs that calls itself a village’- it has streets that are numbered and have signals and everything! It has organized blocks! But the buildings are never taller than three storeys, and almost never taller than one to begin with. The biggest places by far are the hab apartment blocks laid out as blocks padded with public greenspaces that make up the residential neighborhoods, and the warehouses and stockyards that pack densely into the city’s supplementary industrial zone. Everything else could be any small town, where the local commercial and industrial is either a literal or figurative mom and pop operation, or proudly union operated, by folks that take pride in the community. There’s holy places here, too, and not just of a homogenous type. The first local religious leaders happened to be those blessed types that were big into coexistence, and truly kept an open door policy to new arrivals wanting their own appropriate places to pray. You put that into context that New Laredo seems to be a place that doesn’t want you to have to ever drive home from a bar or a head shop, because they always seem near at hand, and you get a macro view of the people that choose to deal with the heat and the dry, and call it home: this is a place that doesn’t mind if you’re both at once, folks, really. Welcome to the Only God Can Judge Me Capital of The Galaxy. It doesn’t scream it at the top of its lungs, it just holds it quietly as a point of pride.

It goes without saying you can get great barbecue here. But if you only eat plant-based? Folks around here work magic with those huge yields of corn. Corn magic. Either choice comes with a cerveza.

Folks don’t tend to go further south than the city proper, where the city aerospace port has taken up residence. It’s a big sprawling slab of softcrete tarmac, allowing traffic of both atmospheric and controlled-approach orbital vehicles, and a substantial enough tower and sensor dome to handle the ins and outs of handling both. It doesn’t really have much in the way of a terminal, beyond a functional place to get checked in and catch a ride, but otherwise it’s pretty spartan. Beyond that, the terrain abruptly begins to roughen, and hills start to rise out of the formerly level ground. These are hills rich with iron, copper, aluminum and even gold, and the resourcer collectives have set up mine-and-refine outposts throughout, interconnected with spaghetti strands of trucking roads leading back to the city proper.

More spectacular and valuable from the perspective of being a galactic wonder, let alone the material worth that can be netted from a sustainable harvest of even the teeniest bit of it, is a massive, cavernous hollow deposit of bismuth crystal that lies at the heart of New Laredo’s resourcing complex. Folks don’t often realize how valuable that incredibly pretty stuff is in day-to-day life in the Terran Timeline, it’s a major elemental component in a number of alloy and polymer stocks used by assembly mills, which means functionally everything crafted by a 3D printer most likely has at least a little bit of it in it. It’s used in a myriad of medicines and non-narcotic pain relievers too. Lastly, it’s density and weight makes it the natural choice for being the primary ingredient in ballistic projectile polymer. This has given the cavern one of its most dramatic monikers: The Bullet Ocean.

Further out beyond, secluded with its own out of the way roads, and often with only helo traffic going in and out, is the NuWave compound. Now, not to say that folks closer to the city don’t put up fences for their own specific reasons, but NuWave? That razor wire doesn’t have to be quite that sharp. Not the least of which because you’re supposed to be a neighboring cooperative within a community, you know? The people that were going to make New Laredo a communications hub for frontier colonies? Kind of an asshole move. The FTLC tower is impressive though, stretching as high into the sky as anything in New Laredo. As is the reconfigured starship they’ve set up as an arcology tower, equal parts business offices, residences and self-sufficiency facilities- you can’t argue they haven’t set up a very pretty shop in amongst a lot of rockiness. They could just stand to be a little more neighborly about matters. It’s not just that the fences are high and lined with microfilament concertina, it’s that each bit of well-groomed landscaping conceals a guard hut, each nicely maintained interior road is reinforced with retractable anti-vehicle bollards, and the fancy interior walls and gates disguise the fact the place is laid out like a castle. It’s a whole lot of not right, and it’s been making a fair few of the residents nervous.

You go farther south, and you start to get into some real extreme suck. Like from a geological and archeological standpoint, there’s a lot to be found in a dried up ancient sea, but on the other hand, the treacherous and desiccating cliffs of The Saltcrags are hard to love if you’re a living being that’s mostly composed of water and has a breakable skeleton. You think it’s a salt flat, but no, that’s an optical illusion you’re attempting to walk across, and you’ve already tumbled to your death into a gully of salt coarse enough to ablate skin. That’s a bad way to go, falling into a self-salting wound hole. Because people avoid this place like they’re snails, it makes it the sort of place just waiting for the exact correct form of motherfucker to come along and use as a covert place of operations. This is of course where Kristof van Rooyen’s been keeping his landed division ship, beneath a textile factory’s worth of salt-white camo tarping. Moving only when the cover of a saltstorm kicks up, assisted by the sensor dome of the nearby NuWay compound, van Rooyen’s goons have been launching their bandit assaults first via outbound helo, then by whichever means of ingress the operation calls for. If there’s a consolation to the fact that this has proven to be an incredibly effective and confusing tactic, it’s that van Rooyen’s pack of assholes have been having a rash of hot-fire skin rashes, agonizing cramps and alarming renal issues due to them being lax with their envirosuit discipline. That’s a bad idea in an area where salt can blow directly into your sinuses as an aerosolized powder should a stiff wind suddenly kick up. Nobody wins trying to settle The Saltcrags, everyone just winds up miserable.

-G